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Chapter 3: When Anger Is False, Laughter Is False

Do two things. One is: eat very slowly, and chew. Count forty times; each bite has to be chewed forty times, not less than that. More you can do but not less. By that time it will be almost liquid - then drink it. So don’t eat - drink. Let everything become liquid inside the mouth. That will give you more satisfaction, more nourishment - and with less quantity. The quantity will be reduced to half automatically, because when you have to chew forty times, if you go with the quantity you are eating now, you will take three or four hours. So one gets tired and sleepy

Second thing: in the night before you go to sleep, sit on the bed and for twenty minutes, just in imagination, eat whatsoever you like. Yes! You are allowed as much as you want. But do it exactly as if you are eating, mm? Just visualize the whole thing: take your empty hand to your mouth, take a bite, chew it, taste it, smell it, swallow it. After three or four days you will feel that it has almost become real. And it will give you more satisfaction than your real food, because it is not really the food that you need. You need something else. Food is just a substitute.

So this you do for twenty minutes. If you enjoy and want to do more, you can do more, because it can never do any harm to anybody. And after doing it, just lie in the bed as if you are a small child - huddled up just like a small child - as small as you can imagine. And tell me after ten days.

Within ten days the tendency will go, and you will come out of it very very alive, and very confident about yourself.

*

In the meditations my mind gets worse and worse and worse.I’ve been getting really depressed and heavy, and putting myself down. I’ve been feeling I want to cry, then thinking that it was all rubbish and I should do something else - I should be happy and gay.

Just close your eyes and let it happen. [She immediately starts crying.] Look at me(you think you cry, but your cry is not deep. You somehow manage it - it is not coming from the depth. You may have suppressed it too much; it doesn’t touch you at all.

So the first thing to remember is to allow it to happen, and to move into it deeply. Don’t say that it is rubbish - it is not. Your saying that it is rubbish is rubbish. It is one of the real things of life. If you cannot cry deeply, you cannot enjoy; they are in proportion. The more intense your crying, the more will be the intensity of your laughter. If you cannot be really sad, you cannot be gay; it is impossible.

Somehow you manage not to be sad - that’s the trouble. So you are not sad, but you cannot be gay. You have to be sad - sadness is a catharsis, it is a cleansing process. Crying is tremendously beautiful - but anybody here can feel that your crying was not coming from the heart. Even you can feel that it is superficial. It is just from the throat; you are not involved in it. Close your eyes and let it happen again. And this time please don’t manage. [There are a few jerks of her body, but nothing else.]